Photo: Pierre Etaix
1 White Material Claire Denis (Fr.)
2 Uncle Boonmee, Who Can Recall His Past Lives Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Th.)
3 La Mujer Sin Cabeza (The Headless Woman) Lucretia Martel (Arg.)
4 Vincere Marco Bellochio (It.)
5 Restrepo Tim Hetherington, Sebastian Junger (US)
6 L'illusioniste (The Illusionist) Sylvain Chomet (Fr.)
7 Hadewijch Bruno Dumont (Fr.)
8 Another Year Mike Leigh (GB)
9 Mother Bong-Ho Joon (Kor.)
10 Un Prophète (A Prophet) Jacques Audiard (Fr.)
Here's hoping 2011 is a terrible year for the movies as well.
Julien Allen
compiled by @JulesArk
Glyn Jones (@voyagefantastic)
Film of the Year: UN PROPHÈTE (Jacques Audiard) and TOY STORY 3 (Lee Unkrich)
Album of the Year: FYFE DANGERFIELD - FLY YELLOW MOON and THE FILTHY SIX – THE FILTHY SIX
TV Highlight: BBC PROMS: SONDHEIM'S 80TH BIRTHDAY; THE TRIP; DOCTOR WHO.
Book of the Year: IT'S ONLY A MOVIE (Mark Kermode); FINISHING THE HAT (Stephen Sondheim).
Stage: ENRON (Lucy Prebble); YES, PRIME MINISTER (Antony Jay/Jonathan Lynn).
Web: ALAN PARTRIDGE: MID MORNING MATTERS (Armando Iannucci/Steve Coogan).
Jonathan Westwood (@cjwestwood)
Film of the Year: SOMEWHERE (Sofia Coppola) I wanted to wait until she had at least five features to her name but after four five-star movies I think I'm already prepared to declare that I have a new favourite director. Sorry, Marty.
Album of the Year: DAVID FORD – LET THE HARD TIMES ROLL (Runner up: The Rhythm You Started by Sophie Madeleine) It makes me physically angry that Matt Cardle is number one and David Ford is unsigned. (Yes, I would have Ford's babies if he asked. Yes, my wife knows this.) Honourable musical mentions: Take To The Sky by Kat Edmondson; How Sad, How Lovely by Connie Converse; Fly Yellow Moon by Fyfe Dangerfield; Catching A Tiger by Lissie; Leave Your Sleep by Natalie Merchant; Dreams by Neil Diamond; Laws Of Illusion by Sarah McLachlan; Circle by Scala and Kolacny Brothers; Admiral Fell Promises by Sun Kil Moon; Brothers by The Black Keys; High Violet by The National; and Love And Its Opposite by Tracey Thorn
TV Highlight: COMMUNITY (NBC, created by Dan Harmon). Honourable mentions: Wallander, Castle, 30 Rock, House, Mad Men, Modern Family, Hung, Better Off Ted, Chuck and The Daily Show
Book of the Year: JUST MY TYPE by Simon Garfield; ROCK AND ROLL WILL SAVE YOUR LIFE by Steve Almond; and - to my shame - THE HUNGER GAMES by Suzanne Collins. (I think I may really be a teenage girl.)
Stage: Not awarded. Only saw one play, Sam Mendes The Tempest at the Old Vic. Simply awful.
Web: NPR's POP CULTURE HAPPY HOUR podcast and PLEDGEMUSIC.
William Thomas (@Flickerdrome)
Film of the Year: LA MUJER SIN CABEZA (THE HEADLESS WOMAN) (Lucretia Martel)
Album of the Year: SUN KIL MOON - ADMIRAL FELL PROMISES (caldo verde records, 2010)
Not many singer/songwriters can sustain an 18 year career of consistently high quality records, let alone produce their finest work on their 11th release, but Sun Kil Moon's Mark Kozelek has pulled off such a feat with 2010's Admiral Fell Promises. Stripped down to just his voice and nylon-string guitar, Admiral Fell Promises is a hugely
impressive work, even by Kozelek's standards – a rich collection of original songs that really feels like a whole coherent piece. Always a mesmerising guitar player, Kozelek pulls out all the stops on this record, coming across like a cross between Segovia and Nick Drake, weaving mellifluous flamenco- and classical-inflected melodies into
his trademark arpegiated fingerpicking and incorporating them all into some of his most beautiful songs yet.The whole album is suffused with a warm, autumnal quality that is engrossing and rewarding, taking the listener on a journey around Europe, through America, to Australia, over natural landscapes painted in sepia tones, to strange situations, people, memories of half-forgotten romanticisms and the melancholy regrets of time passed. But
there is humour in the album too, both in the music and the lyrics, and Kozelek's voice songwriting have finally reached a point of maturity that they've been striving for for so many years, giving this record a stability and consistency that's sometimes been missing from his previous works. Admiral Fell Promises is a real gem from a truly special artist. One of the finest records I've heard for a long time, up there with Nick Drake's Pink Moon.
Honorary mentions: Holly Miranda's The Magician's Private Library and These New Puritans' Hidden
Hester Browne (@hesterbrowne)
Musical Highlight: BANG BANG BANG – MARK RONSON
TV Highlight: MAD MEN (AMC, created by Matthew Weiner).
Book of the Year: THE LAST LETTER FROM YOUR LOVER by Jojo Moyes. Moving, intelligent, evocative, beautifully written.
Bags (@iambags)
Film of the Year: MOTHER (Bong-Joon Ho) This twisted and turned magnificently before flooring me with its final reel suckerpunches. Nothing short of the hitherto brilliant director's first outright masterpiece.
Musical Highlight: ARCADE FIRE – THE SUBURBS
Book of the Year: ALL HOPPED UP AND READY TO GO by Tony Fletcher a remarkable musical history of New York City from jazz thru to punk, a passionately-written fast-moving narrative which does the music & changing cultures of the great city the justice they deserve.
Stage: THE WATER MAGICIAN (Kenji Mizoguchi) – the benshi 'performance ' at the Barbican was a once-in-a-lifetime experience (and well worth catching when they do it again in January) [we'll forgive the obvious Colemanball here – Ed]
Web: @AntonWowl's ENEMIES OF REASON Unswervingly brilliant scything of the worst excesses of the press, and damn funny with it too. This has gone from strength to strength in the last 12 months.
Julien Allen (@JulesArk)
Film of the Year: WHITE MATERIAL (Claire Denis)
Musical Highlight: ALICIA KEYS - THE ELEMENT OF FREEDOM
TV Highlight: THE TRIP (Michael Winterbottom).
Book of the Year: HOW I ESCAPED MY CERTAIN FATE by Stewart Lee
Stage: HAY FEVER (Noel Coward) at the Rose Theatre in Kingston. "-Are you susceptible to music?" "-I'm not sure I know that much about it." "-Well then, you probably are." Noel Coward is the most criminally underrated of all English dramatists. A great writer, who absolutely skewered the upper middle classes.
Web: LEFT FOOT FORWARD.
Charlotte Allen (@notontwitter)
Film of the Year: INCEPTION (Christopher Nolan) and TOY STORY 3 (Lee Unkrich) - both films I immediately wanted to watch again
Musical Highlight: THE FLIGHT OF THE CONCHORDS - WOO A LADY
TV Highlight: MAD MEN (AMC, created by Matthew Weiner).
Book of the Year: THE BRAIN THAT CHANGES ITSELF by Norman Doidge
Stage: THE FLIGHT OF THE CONCHORDS at WEMBLEY ARENA
Web: CELEBRITYPLASTICSURGERY (I can't help myself, it's a sickness)
Romane Allen (@notallowedontwitter)
Film of the Year: DESPICABLE ME (Pierre Coffin) MEGAMIND (Tom McGrath)
Musical Highlight: FIREFLIES – OWL CITY
TV Highlight: TRACEY BEAKER RETURNS (BBC).
Book of the Year: COSMIC by Frank Cotterell Boyce
Stage: HAY FEVER (Noel Coward) at the Rose Theatre in Kingston.
Web: www.andkon.com (arcade games)
Les Vampires (1915) Louis Feuillade (France)
Das Cabinet des Dr Caligari (1920) Robert Weine (Germany)
Freaks (1932) Tod Browning (USA)
Vampyr (1932) Carl Theodor Dreyer (Germany)
The Wolf Man (1941) George Waggner (USA)
The Mask of Satan (1960) Mario Bava (Italy)
The Innocents (1961) Jack Clayton (UK)
The Haunting (1963) Robert Wise (USA)
Psycho (1960) Alfred Hitchcock (USA)
Peeping Tom (1960) Michael Powell (USA)
Les Yeux Sans Visage (1960) Georges Franju (France)
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) Tobe Hooper (USA)
Suspiria (1977) Dario Argento (Italy)
Halloween (1978) John Carpenter (USA)
Alien (1979) Ridley Scott (USA)
Videodrome (1982) David Cronenberg (Can)
The Thing (1982) John Carpenter (USA)
Day of the Dead (1985) George A Romero (USA)
Evil Dead II: Dead by Dawn (1987) Sam Raimi (USA)
Spoorloos (1988) George Sluizer (Netherlands)
The French philosopher and cultural theorist, Jean Baudrillard once said that no matter how many times he had watched it before, he couldn’t sit through the musical numbers of Singin’ In The Rain (Stanley Donen, Gene Kelly, 1952) without feeling his heart pounding in his chest. This is precisely the reaction I get when watching The Band Wagon.
Though released the following year and conceived primarily as a vehicle for an ageing Fred Astaire, The Band Wagon took a much more traditional approach to the musical comedy than Singin’ In The Rain, which was more of a compilation of stunningly rendered musical pastiches than a musical in its own right. In The Band Wagon, a pretentious egotistical director (Jack Buchanan) is hired by an ageing hoofer (Astaire) to direct a Broadway musical with ballerina Cyd Charisse. That’s it.
Whilst it owes a number of things to Singin’ In The Rain (a pair of writers (Comden and Green), the idea to bet heavily on Cyd Charisse’s dancing (inspired by the stunning ballet cameo she offers in Singin’ In The Rain) and the general all round raising of the stakes), what makes The Band Wagon stand out from its predecessor is an effortless chemistry and lightness of touch which seems to have been entirely fortuitous. Whilst Singin’ In The Rain had a tendency to get a bit po-faced about “the biz” and the characters’ “careers”, it is as though the participants in The Band Wagon are rejoicing in their appreciation of the innate superfluousness of the genre. Astaire’s character is washed up, knows it and in case he forgets it, the first reel rams it down his throat. But he doesn’t turn out not to be, he just finds out how to make do. The inspired addition of British classical actor Jack Buchanan to the cast as the arthouse prig Jeffrey Cordova (said to have been unkindly modelled on polymath Jose Ferrer) paints the entire production with a topcoat of class.
This SMIC is deliberately uncomplicated and direct, in that it takes the adjective ’sublime’ at face value. What is put on the screen is sublime because it looks and feels sublime, it does not require deep understanding or analysis to make it so. There are two contenders for SMIC status in this picture. I will leave readers to discover the climactic ballet ‘Girl Hunt’ for themselves, for as stunning as it is, it represents an attempt to outdo Singin’ In The Rain which, whilst successful in this regard, doesn’t quite achieve the poetry of its competitor or the sheer fusion of mise-en-scene with medium which a SMIC must do – it must exist for the camera. The technicity of the camerawork in the “Dancing in the Park” sequence (also referred to as “Dancing in the Dark”) is practically indistinguishable from that of the dancers. The context is simply that Astaire and Charisse have found, whilst mounting their disastrous musical production, that they are from different worlds and are struggling to find much in common. But when he joins her for a walk in the park, not a word needs to be exchanged.
In the restaurant section of the weekly Parisian tourist guide, Pariscope, there is a class of restaurant defined as hors-catégorie ("uncategorisable") which denotes the dozen or so very finest gastronomic establishments - Lucas-Carton, La Tour d'Argent, Lasserre etc.
He occupies a unique position in French Cinema, partly in that his films are inspired almost entirely by American film noir but principally because he created a singular style of brutal minimalism which ran counter to every instinct present in French Cinema before or since. The Nouvelle Vague troika of Truffaut, Godard and Chabrol, who borrowed Melville's occasional habit of "reportage-style" shooting for their early films, were far too self-conscious about their need to make artistic statements to ever come close to matching the stripped-down, fatalistic brilliance of Melville's best work.
Apart from his resistance drama l'Armée des Ombres (Army of Shadows, 1969) which on its re-release by the BFI a couple of years ago, promptly gatecrashed most major film critics' Top Ten Films of 2006, almost all of Melville's films deal with organised crime and in particular, heists. The depth Melville brings to these tightly-crafted genre pieces resides in the almost unbearable sense of restraint which pervades both the acting and cinematography. The actors internalise all emotion, speaking only when and to the extent that it is absolutely necessary to do so. The effect is deliberate and almost theatrical, but the action, when it comes, has twice the impact. The world he portrays is all the more powerful for what you do not see and hear than for what you do.
Few if any filmmakers in the crime-thriller genre have shown this same understanding of Cinema's power to take the audience to a place and to keep them wondering what is happening and what will happen. By remarkable coincidence, the recent Cannes prizewinner: No Country for Old Men (Joel & Ethan Coen, 2007) provides what must be one of the strongest of modern examples of this. It is almost as if the audience is exhorted to feel the emotion that the actors will not display.
Those modern filmmakers who have discovered and loved Melville, in particular Walter Hill, Michael Mann, Quentin Tarantino, Jim Jarmusch and the Hong Kong directors Ringo Lam and John Woo, manifest an obsessive need to pay homage through their work. Jim Jarmusch's film Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999) is a devotional treatment of Melville's existentialist masterpiece Le Samouraï (1967) a film which defined the brooding intensity of its star, Alain Delon. To borrow a football term, Melville was also a set-piece specialist, hence the existence of at least half a dozen contenders in his work for the title of SMIC.
It is almost be impossible to avoid the word 'cool' when describing Melville's films, so I will not try. Yes, they are 'cool' (until something else is considered cool), but they are worth discovering because they are so much more. I've chosen a scene from his most famous film, Le Cercle Rouge (1970) in which the character of Corey (Alain Delon) having just been released from prison, has burgled the personal safe of the Marseille drug baron who put him there. He seeks late night recreation in a billiards club.
For one of the best examples of ironic juxtaposition, we have to turn to film makers who have made the confusion of genres and audience expectations into their own personal hallmark: the Coen Brothers. Their films might appear on their face to be firmly placed in clearly definable categories, whether it be film noir (Blood Simple (1984), Fargo (1996)) comedy (Raising Arizona (1987), The Big Lebowski (1998)) or period fresco (Barton Fink (1991), The Hudsucker Proxy (1994)) but to lovers of their work, their voice is so unique (and so richly varied) as to be uncategorisable. None of the abovementioned films can be so easily nailed down. They play with audiences’ preconceptions of genres within all their films and continually mix and match different dramatic impulses to create a fully sensurramic experience for the viewer.
But this isn’t all playful nonsense or overt artistry. There is a deeply uncomfortable scene in the Coen’s latest, highly-decorated and engaged film No Country for Old Men (2007) wherein the psycopathic Anton Chigurh toys with an elderly gas station attendant and invites him to toss a coin for what the audience knows to be his life. The scene is satisfying because it provides the thrill of danger (the fear of death) with the quotidien humour of misunderstanding and the sadness intrinsic in the film’s title: the audience finds itself genuinely laughing, genuinely frightened and genuinely sad. The mix of emotions intended for the entire duration of the film is thus brought down to a micro-level.
But lest we forget ourselves, back to the SMIC. In the Coen’s uber-stylish Irish gangster film Miller’s Crossing (1990) Leo O’Bannon (Albert Finney) is a wanted man, and two men are despatched to dispose of him, but O’Bannon, who has just put on folk classic ‘Danny Boy’ and settled into bed with a cigar, is having none of it. A moment of pure pleasure and indulgence, quite apart from its virtuosic mise-en-scene, the sequence has suspense, slapstick humour, pathos and what amounts to ultraviolence, all underscored with the purest, sweetest of tunes. Enjoy.
It struck me after selecting this SMIC that if one were to try and draw up a short list of contenders for sublime moments in Scorsese’s films, about half a dozen would have one thing in common: they would involve a soliloquy, and more often than not, it would be delivered by Robert De Niro. For a director who appears to love the use of the camera, this is perhaps surprising, but it reveals a lot about what makes Scorsese a great filmmaker.
Whether it be the edgy, childlike, improvised repartee of Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver (1976), in front of his mirror (”you talkin’ to me?”), the edgy, childlike, fantasy banter of Rupert Pupkin in The King of Comedy (1979) (again in front of the mirror) (”Six weeks? It’s impossible!”), or Johnny Boy’s edgy, childlike protestations in Mean Streets (1974) (”I’m gonna pay ‘im next week. I’m gonna PAY HIM!”) there is a fascination in Scorsese’s work with letting the protagonist lay himself bare through talking, uninterrupted, at length…and eventually talking himself out.
No-one has ever better captured the combination of danger and pathos of that most complex of species: Scorsese is the great director of the American male. And De Niro, like Brando before him, was its finest prototype on screen. What the “physical” tradition of male actors (Cagney, Brando, Dean, De Niro, Kinski, Depardieu) brought to Cinema, apart from the absence of any artifice whatsoever, was the sometimes painful experience of watching an actor appearing to genuinely undergo an emotional experience as he acted.
But it isn’t as simple as De Niro the actor being the mouthpiece of Scorsese the tortured male. Both Taxi Driver and Raging Bull were written by the venerable angry beast of 70s cinema, Paul Schrader, who also collaborated with Scorsese on The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) (where the prime De Niro role of Judas was taken by Harvey Keitel, presumably for fear that Willem Dafoe might be lost in the flames if De Niro were cast).
In addition, Scorsese had with him on these films the considerable talents of editor Thelma Schoonmaker and above all, director of photography Michael Chapman. Chapman had cut his teeth as Gordon Willis’s camera operator on the not insignificant The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972) and also held the camera for Spielberg on Jaws (1975), before lighting Taxi Driver and Raging Bull. There is no element of luck in this: Welles was lucky on Citizen Kane (1941) that RKO designated Gregg Toland to look after him, but Scorsese is ruthless and meticulous in his selection of only the finest available talent to work on his pictures, all of whom must share his scholarly cinematic sensibility.
It is the importance of this collaboration which makes Scorsese a “Hollywood” auteur – a director of great artists, like Griffith or DeMille before him, but every bit a European-style auteur like Rossellini or Bergman, whose films he had secretly admired whilst growing up in the tough New York district of Queens.
So whilst this artistry is what helps make the SMIC sublime – consider the mise-en-scene and editing of what would otherwise be a simple shot of a man in his dressing room – the icing on the cake is the substance of the scene itself: the perfect use of an apposite cinematic reference to exemplify the state of La Motta’s life, the legendary car scene in On The Watefront (Elia Kazan, 1954) where Terry Molloy (Brando) upbraids his brother Charlie (Rod Steiger) for having ended his career in its prime by forcing him to take a dive.
And this is where De Niro’s performance in Raging Bull goes beyond anything else in Scorsese’s work and beyond almost anything else besides. La Motta is certainly a Terry Molloy, a washed-up boxer, firmly ensconced in ‘Palookaville’, but one who has transferred his meagre celebrity to showbusiness – delivering monologues from theatre and film to cabaret audiences. And naturally, he is a mediocre speaker. Just as to see a magnificent athlete reduced to a pathetic hulk of a man, to see one of the most demonstrative actors of his generation monotonously mumbling mistiming and misquoting classic lines of dialogue delivered by his predecessor 30 years before, piles pathos upon pathos. Ambitious, courageous, devastating filmmaking. Oh, and as Mark Kermode might say, men are permitted to cry.
SMIC stands for Sublime Moments In Cinema.
It's a little sideline affiliated to www.orsonwelles.co.uk.
Any comments or suggestions for future SMICs welcome.
Enjoy.
